Business-to-Business SEO Strategy
B2B SEO is an important strategic marketing tool for companies looking to increase their visibility, gain website traffic, and create a strong presence online.
While the core components of SEO will remain the same regardless of your business objectives, your overall strategy and the specific tools you’ll lean on will vary depending on your industry.
An eCommerce platform will have a very different SEO strategy compared to a B2B SaaS company.
In this post, we’ll take a look at Business-to-Business (B2B) SEO strategies generally differ from B2C SEO strategies, how critical differences in the sales process produce these different strategies, and how B2B marketers can implement successful SEO programs focused on content and thought leadership.
Cornerstones of B2B SEO
Who’s Buying?
Businesses typically aren’t making one-click purchases from their couch like many B2C buyers. The sales process is usually longer, higher stakes, and therefore, much more involved.
Typically, you’re selling to professionals who know their industry. More likely, you’re selling to a team of professionals. Or at the very least, someone who needs to justify their purchasing decision to company stakeholders.
This means that your strategy will need to appeal to multiple decision-makers, each of whom might be looking to solve their problem in different ways.
While this can be intimidating, it can be a good thing because it provides a ton of opportunity to leverage your content marketing.
How so?
Well, a big part of B2B SEO is “thought leadership.” And while it makes me cringe just to type that term out, it’s a critical part of any professionally-focused marketing strategy.
Demonstrating your expertise on multiple fronts within your own industry is a big component of building trust within a sales prospect. Better still is demonstrating how you’re able to leverage that expertise (via your product or service) in order to address the pain points your potential clients/customers face.
If they know the extent to which you understand the challenges they face within their industry, that gives the decision-makers more confidence to pull the trigger on your product or service.
So, building trust within your prospect is important to closing sales.
No duh.
The question is, how do we leverage this into an SEO strategy?
Building Trust Through Content
It starts and ends with good content.
Whether in the form of blog articles, whitepapers, guest posts, eBooks, or podcasts, your content strategy should address customer pain points, provide not-so-obvious answers to common industry questions, and on the whole, work towards building the all-important trust factor.
This type of content serves multiple purposes.
As mentioned, it can build trust by playing an ongoing role in your sales process and can be provided or referenced by your sales team to nurture prospects.
However, as a factor within your SEO strategy, it will play an important role in increasing visibility and acquiring high-value traffic from the SERPs.
It’s important to remember users who land on your site aren’t likely to convert right away. That’s just the nature of B2B sales.
But by creating a memorable experience, you’re establishing an organic relationship between your brand and the potential customer. The next time the customer searches a relevant question and it’s your website that shows up, you’re furthering that relationship.
If the user has another question and types it into Google, he or she might be actively looking for your site in the SERPs because you’ve established yourself as a reliable source in the field.
That’s the essence of thought leadership.
Now, how do we go about creating this type of content? How do we become “thought leaders.”
Long Tail, Low Volume
One mantra you’ll often see when comparing B2B and B2C is “B2C = high volume keywords and B2B = low volume keywords.”
And to a certain extent, this is true.
Targeting potential buyers throughout the sales funnel will require answering specific questions and addressing pain points. This means the search queries will tend to be more obscure and specific. Hence, low volume.
Because they will often be in the form of a question, the queries will be longer. Hence, long tail.
In order to optimally perform this strategy, marketers can leverage two different tools: keyword research and customer surveys.
SEO tools such as MOZ and SEMRush are great for performing keyword research. They allow users to identify relevant search queries within their industry and develop content around them.
Customer services are fantastic because they allow you to obtain direct feedback from your customers about issues they struggle with, major pain points in their industry, and ways to make their job easier.
By speaking directly to them, you’ll gain first hand knowledge of how customers talk about your products and services, allowing you to further optimize your content.
B2B SEO Success
By implementing a content-focused SEO strategy, B2B companies have the opportunity to become thought leaders in their industry and establish themselves as a pillar of trust for their target markets.
While it’s not the optimal strategy for every enterprise out there, the general focus of B2B SEOs should be establishing their business as an authority with the solutions your customers need.
And if you’re looking for B2B SEO services, Fanatically Digital has the thought-leading, web-optimizing team for you!